Google Calendar Now Lets You Schedule Optional Attendees in Meetings

By Casey Pham on 11/29/2010 12:19 PST

Bringing its features up to more closely match Microsoft’s enterprise-focused Exchange and Outlook environments, Google is bringing a new feature to Google Calendar that will allow users to schedule meetings, appointments, and events for optional attendees. Rather than scheduling a meeting or event as a mandatory event for everyone, Google is saying that it sometimes make more sense for some guests on your lists to decide for themselves, based on the speaker or topic of discussion, whether or not they would want to attend or be productive with their time doing other tasks. The feature is getting slowly rolled out right now, and will allow your guests to manage their meetings more efficient.

That’s where Google Calendar’s new “Optional attendees” feature comes in. With a couple clicks, you can openly communicate the importance of a meeting for each attendee. Click on the “Make some attendees optional link” above the guest list and then toggle the role of each attendee by clicking the icon next to his or her name. So far, this feature has helped us more effectively manage our own time on the Calendar team — we hope it does the same for you.